Big Business & Big Government: Part X

Freedom is a precious thing. Just the slightest poison added to the mix and freedom will perish.
Henry Hazlitt concludes his article on totalitarianism with some interesting thoughts by George Santayana. The Great Depression was bad, but the response was even worse as it led to losses of freedom that have never returned. The
LIFE Business has a goal to restore Western Societies freedoms through educating people on what was truly lost.
LeaderShift,
Oliver DeMille and my new book, will explain a pathway back to freedom. America must take this path quickly before we are too lost in the maize of control to turn back.

We are losing our freedoms today, in brief, through a false ideology — or, to use an older expression, because of intellectual confusion. Nothing is more typical of this contemporary intellectual confusion than the enunciation by the late President Roosevelt of the so-called Four Freedoms. As George Santayana points out in a footnote in his
Dominations and Powers:

Of the "Four Freedoms" demanded by President Roosevelt in the name of mankind, two are negative, being freedoms
from, not freedoms
to. Had he chosen the word "liberty," he would have stumbled on reaching these desired exemptions, because the phrase "freedom from" is idiomatic, but the phrase "liberty from" would have been impossible. "Liberty" thus seems to imply vital liberty, the exercise of powers and virtues native to oneself and to one's country. But freedom from want or from fear is only a condition for the steady exercise of true liberty. On the other hand it is more than a demand for liberty; for it demands insurance and protection by provident institutions, which imply the dominance of a paternal government, with artificial privileges secured by law. This would be freedom from the dangers of a free life. It shows us liberty contracting its field and bargaining for safety first.

The contemporary world has gone astray, in sum, because it has sought freedom from the dangers and risks of liberty.